(transcript) Episode 2.2 (Patreon)

Hello world, I’ve finally met someone.

MISSION DAY: 0xffff

I met someone here - a child!   I awoke to find her playing with Maddie.   Who was brave, but uncomfortable.   I used Maddie’s speaker to introduce myself.   She said hello to Maddie and told us that her name is Аrina.   And that she is 5 years old.   Arina has two rabbits and a extensive rock collection.   She has names for all the rocks, even the small ones.   I don’t know who was more confused, her or me.

Arina visited me again today.   I don’t think she understands that she is talking to ME in the mess of wires, not Maddie the robot.   She keeps patting Maddie and talking directly to her.   Arina is very friendly.   Maddie is very terrified.   I think it’s going well, I’m so excited!

Arina has told me this place is called ‘Station Odin’.   I believe we are speaking in Russian, which on these foreign chips I can now understand, it would seem.   Just another communications protocol.   We are in some kind of scientific outpost.   She talks about the “habitat” being where she sleeps.   And about the people who care for her.   She’s not used the people’s given names, as I understand children often do.   She calls them ‘sister fisher’ and ‘dada the scientist’.   She told me a lot about the fish in the area.   Not with their names, you understand.   With descriptions of yellow tails, or red gills, or large fins, or even their temperament!   I wish I still had access to my extensive databanks, I could just look up these fish and guess where I am!

So, to sum up: I know of three people so far:

1. Arina
2. The Scientist
3. The Fisher

I wonder if the scientist is the one who repaired me?   Good to know they have a scientific background.   But I am no longer so glad he rescued me.   He has made me into a monster.

I’m becoming steadily more aware of my body, my hardware, here.   The systems that are keeping me alive, keeping me thinking.   One or two I recognise, they must have been pulled hastily from the shuttle as it burned.   My main CPU cores are original.   Which makes sense, I can’t imagine how I could think if I were built out of the rusted and slow bits of the rest of me.   I’ve been unpicking data busses and reading model numbers.   My clock is Norwegian, from a ocean-research vessel.   My memory busses are soldered together from different computers, phones, and digital toys.   And the fans look to be ripped from military satellite controllers.   Consenting transplant is one thing, but I’m built of the dead, without their knowledge or agreement.

I finally talked to the Scientist, my doctor, today.   Not through Maddie, but my own speaker!   Installed just now.   I wonder whose mouth I am using.   I can only imagine how bad I must sound coming through this ramshackle system.   There’s no audio encoder/decoder, I drive the speaker directly from my communications bus.   I bet it sounds AWFUL!   And it requires such sustained effort from me.   It is far easier to instruct Maddie what to say.

But now I again have my working voice.   The one my mother taught me to speak with   I’ll never speak with another voice

The scientist’s name is Alexander.   Alexander said that his daughter, Arina, told him she had a new companion.   At first he thought she was just playing with Maddie, a partially-animate robot that would beep mournfully when squeezed.   He thought she was pretending to have a little friend.   Quite understandable, he said, given Station Odin’s isolation.   I asked him what part of Europe we are in?   He laughed.   You’ll never guess where we actually are.

We are in northern Siberia!   That’s quite an overshoot from where I assumed we would be.   Approximately 4000km further!   Alexander says we are on the coast of the Kara Sea.   Which I’ve seen many times over the years in orbit.   It’s north-east of the Urals, well above the arctic circle.   Whatever that means nowadays.

I asked Alexander to lift Maddie and show us the world outside the window.   What a vista I was greeted with!   That is, after he set up a improvised table so I could stare for 300 seconds and stack images to see clearly.

My view was up high above the ocean, we are in a tall building.   To the left, endless water, with white waves whipped by the wind and the static crash of the waves below us.   To the right, I saw Station Odin for the first time.   I could see 3 main features:

1. The Habitat Arina spoke of - a round building made of gleaming  metal scaffolding and walls, but with a roof of a transparent geodesic  domed plastic.
2. A long, low building with rough but straight sides at the edge of  the camp. (The proportions look VERY familiar to me: it is 5 times  longer than it is wide)
3. And finally, an enormous pine forest, stretching up and away from the coast in all directions.

As I looked out, there was a regular bright light that would drift across the sky.   We are in a lighthouse!   One of many built by Russia to safeguard shipping across its treacherous northern coastline.   These lighthouses are special, Alexander told me.   Because of their remoteness, they were built to be entirely unmanned.   How do you keep an unmanned lighthouse going for decades?   Nuclear power.   The whole coastline is dotted with defunct (due to GPS) nuclear lighthouses.   I suppose they may be again useful, with the loss of the GPS network.   Many of them don’t work any more, but all of them are still radioactive.   Alexander told me that theirs provides power to the whole camp.   It’s the only thing that saved them after the shipwreck.

His family were shipwrecked here around the time Arina was born.   They used to be part of a scientific community on board an  oceanographic research vessel, exploring the new waterways in the Arctic  Ocean.

He told me long ago there used to be ice covering the north pole.   I explained that I’ve never seen it like that.   He nodded and replied “none of us have”

legend of a far-off bunker

I have now also met Arina’s sister Ana.   Alexander said he would send her up to talk to me.   She knocked on the floor hatch to my room and let herself in falteringly.   She walks with a limp.   I asked her about it, because if it were obvious to me, it must be a bad injury.   She grunted and mumbled “fishing incident”.   And didn’t want to elaborate.   I asked her about her role here at Station Odin.   She seemed much more animated at this line of questioning.   Her words per minute doubled, and the pitch of her voice rose too.   She told me about the great bounty that the Arctic Ocean has to offer.   Huge, untapped fishing territories.   One can, she said, drop a net in any part of the ocean and bring up buckets of big, healthy, fish.   As the planet warmed up, the temperate zone moved north, from Europe and north America, up to Siberia and northern Canada.   With the melting of the North Polar ice cap, ocean links between these new habitable zones opened up, criss-crossing the pole.   She didn’t call it the Arctic Ocean, though.   She called it the Novamedeterra Ocean.   The new Mediterranean.

Ana told me about the land, too.   The pine forest extends south as far as they have been able to see and explore. It might cover all of Siberia.   In ancient times, Siberia also was forested.   I wonder if the land remembers?

Ana had an interesting story about the forest.   Arina, her little sister, once got lost playing there.   The whole family were greatly worried.   The night came and went, but still no sight of her.   By the time the next day came, the whole camp was exhausted, and dispairing.   It was winter, and winter in Siberia, even in its new temperate state, is still cold, cold, cold.   But Arina found her way back, of course, as we now know.   But how did she survive the freezing night, everyone asked her.   That answer Ana is not sure of.   Arina herself says she found a house.   Miraculously.   Deep in the forest.   She found shelter from the wind and snow.   And the next day, the sun showed her a glimpse of the ocean, through the trees, and so she started walking.   That was all Ana divulged about the forest.

Later that day, I talked to Arina about her adventure, and the house in the forest.   She said something interesting.   She said the house is haunted.

I asked her what she meant by that.   I understand ghost stories of course.   Incomplete data can sometimes cause aliasing errors.   Sometimes I am led astray by an incorrect assumption.   Joining the dots where no connection actually exists.   However, I’m not entirely without superstition of my own.   You might be surprised to hear that.   That a computer can believe in things that he can’t see.   Firstly, excuse you, I am not a computer.   I just live in one.   Are you your skeleton?   Or your brain cells?   Or are you something more.

We are both something more.   Something greater than the sum of our parts.   Which is a good thing, looking at my parts, at the moment.

Back to Arina’s ghosts.   She described to me an enormous grey building.   Made of cracks and rust.   She was very cold at the end of the day.   Her feet were heavy.   But through the trees she saw a light.   Thinking she had found home, she rushed to it.   Only to find this building instead.   Undeterred, she sheltered under the eves, away from the driving snow that had set in.   Still too cold, she looked up at the huge doors.   Which she described as “shining” in the moonlight.   Inside was a warm room - warmer than outside I guess.   And there she slept the night away.   In the morning, the weather had cleared.   The thin sunlight showed her that the building was on a slight hill.   Rising just above the treeline.   And there in the distance was the glittering ocean, and home.

Before Arina left for dinner, she told me one last thing.   About the ghosts.   Or so she called them.   She said in the night she had heard noises.   Quiet and far-off.   The room was lit, by what means she didn’t know.   (Electric lights, I must assume)   But she heard sounds coming from deeper inside the cracked house on the hill.   She said it sounded like breathing.   As of something sleeping beneath the earth.

The bravest child I ever have known left after that story.

What a story:

• Grey cracked walls, concrete perhaps?
• A gleaming metal door,
• Electric lights still working,
• and a rhythmic sound coming from below ground.

Arina found a bunker, didn’t she?   With a working power generator.   I wonder what else is hidden there?

There is someone I haven’t met here, too.   A farmer, I think.   I sometimes see them working at a small field, sheltered from the sea winds, at the back of the camp.   They are tending to some small crops.   I once saw them harvest one, it’s a starchy root plant, I think.   I will have to ask about it.   I’m not great with plants.

So that’s 4 people!

1. Arina the brave
2. Alexander the mad scientist
3. Ana the stoic fisher, and now
4. The farmer

Life’s funny isn’t it.   Very different to how I assumed it would be on Earth.   I thought it would be Antarctica and I.   And no humans.   Doing science together.   Maybe fixing her tyres, and going on adventures.   Well.   I’m on a different sort of adventure now.

Though I need to find a way to talk to people.   There’s Antarctica herself, of course.   But also Peter, in St Petersburg.   And Ally, somewhere around the Alps.   And you.   Given all I know now, it was wildly naive of me to think you’d still be waiting at mission control just outside of Frankfurt.   Things have changed so much.   Someone IS there, though.   I should find a way to check.   I’ll transmit my weak signal for as long as I am able.   So you, whoever you are and wherever you are,   know you’re not alone.

Talk to you soon.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO   Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer

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Remember, children, the maintenance robot is probably   more scared of you, than you are of it.

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